I was really tempted to bite on Ascension, but the lukewarm reception has done me the favor of saving me a couple of bucks. I'm still going to get it, but I'm going to wait until it's, like, $20 in May or whatever. I've just got too much other awesome shit to play at the moment. Plus, I think there's still two games in that God of War Saga Collection that I haven't even gotten to yet.

I was really tempted to bite on Ascension, but the lukewarm reception has done me the favor of saving me a couple of bucks. I'm still going to get it, but I'm going to wait until it's, like, $20 in May or whatever. I've just got too much other awesome shit to play at the moment. Plus, I think there's still two games in that God of War Saga Collection that I haven't even gotten to yet.

Yeah, I've been on board with God of War from Day 1 since I'm interested in Greek mythology. Fun games with an epic story. Going to get no matter what. Never had a PSP so when they put the 2 PSP games on the PS3 with the Origins collection, I jumped on them and knocked them both out in a day.

It's obviously only a bit of tongue in cheek humour. The phrase "Bros before Hos" is hardly anything to get your knickers in a twist over. I don't know the context of what you have to do to get the trophy though, what's the deal with that?

It wasn't women's groups that took issue with that little nugget of misogyny, actually. It was a predominantly male gaming press that raised the alarm, and rightfully so.

Still the fact that they got upset over it in a series where every female character in the ENTIRE SERIES is only seen as a sex object besides Athena and Pandora is laughable.

Originally Posted by Tomsta666

It's obviously only a bit of tongue in cheek humour. The phrase "Bros before Hos" is hardly anything to get your knickers in a twist over. I don't know the context of what you have to do to get the trophy though, what's the deal with that?

It's obviously only a bit of tongue in cheek humour. The phrase "Bros before Hos" is hardly anything to get your knickers in a twist over. I don't know the context of what you have to do to get the trophy though, what's the deal with that?

From Polygon's review:

At this point in Ascension, I had been stomaching the graphic gore that saturates the game well enough. It was gross, but it was all cartoonish and over the top. I violently collided with my threshold an hour or so later during the latter point of one of the key boss fights in the game, which, without divulging plot details, involved a scene which forces you to violently beat a female character to death with Kratos' fists.

Yes, this character is an antagonist, and yes, you kill other female characters throughout God of War: Ascension. But there's an almost pornographic level of intimacy to the violence here that pushed things too far for me. The brutal, bone-shattering assault on a realistic female avatar was horrific regardless of its context, the imagery too loaded for me to shrug it off as just another God of War Moment TM. And then the assault was robbed of any narrative impact whatsoever by a throwaway story device. It didn't matter. I had to watch it happen and then it didn't mean anything. And then approximately 45 seconds later, I unlocked a trophy called "Bros before Hos."

If I wasn't reviewing the game, this would have been where I stopped. I didn't stop, but regardless, this is where God of War: Ascension's campaign lost me. I could go on about the nonsensical puzzles Sony Santa Monica closes the game with, or the brutal combat sequences that practically demand that you've found all of the health and magic upgrades in the game in order to successfully clear them. But after the moment I just described, it all just seemed gross and disturbing and unnecessary. It makes any trivial attempt at humanizing Kratos via God of War's now routine evoking of the wife and child he murdered while under the spell of Ares even more hollow.

Given the context, I couldn't disagree more in regards to your knicker twisting dismissal.

From the quoted Polygon review, I would've been more offended by the physical assault of the woman much more than that three-word phrase... unless there was a very good plot justification for that beating. Given the genre of the game and how many sequels there are, I highly doubt that the plot justification is there though.